Corruption performance voting and the electoral context

Abstract

Fighting corruption is a vital aspect of good governance. When assessing government performance voters should thus withdraw electoral support from government parties that turn a blind eye to or even engage in corrupt practices. Whereas most accounts of performance-based voting focus on economic outcomes, we analyse whether and to what extent voters punish incumbents for high levels of corruption. Using data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, we find that while voters perceiving high levels of corruption punish incumbents, corruption performance voting depends on individual-level attributes and the electoral context: it is most likely for non-partisans, for voters who believe that government turnover will bring about change, and in systems where corruption is a salient issue. Yet, corruption performance voting is not moderated by the clarity of political responsibility. Studying these conditions helps us to understand why corruption is more persistent in some contexts than in others.

Political corruption and capture of the minority

“…This occurs in the second scenario, where both X and Y are now assumed to incur reputational costs when corruption is detected. This assumption is in line with some evidence provided by Schleiter and Voznaya (), Charron and Bågenholm (), and Ecker, Glinitzer, and Meyer (). Such evidence shows that electoral control is lower when voters perceive no difference between ruling and opposition parties, as they accumulate distrust towards the entire political system.…”

“…Third, when corruption permeates the entire political system, then political markets are usually poorly contestable: Both the ruling parties and their opponents are observationally equivalent in the voters' eyes, and this will make political turnover less likely. This would also explain why corrupt politicians in high‐corruption countries are often reelected (e.g., Bågenholm, , and Ecker et al., ). According to our model, we may expect totalitarian or weakly democratic regimes—where political turnover is almost absent—to be largely corrupt and associated with weak criminal sanctioning systems.…”

Static and Dynamic Models of Retrospective Voting: A Clarification and Application to the Individual Level

“…First, studies at the aggregate level risk to make the ecological fallacy: though the vote share of incumbent parties depends on aggregate performance measures, this does not mean that individual voters hold incumbent parties to account (Dassonneville and Lewis‐Beck ). Second, a focus on the individual level allows taking into account individual‐level heterogeneity, as previous studies have indicated that individual‐level characteristics such as partisanship and political sophistication moderate the relationship between the perceptions of the government's performance and the party choice (Ecker, Glinitzer, and Meyer ; de Vries and Giger ). Third, while switches from opposition parties toward incumbent parties and vice versa cancel each other out when investigating vote shares on the aggregate level, a focus on the individual level provides more insights into the determinants of vote switches, as it shows gross volatility between elections (Crow ).…”

“…While a number of studies report an individual‐level dynamic model of retrospective voting as a robustness test (see for instance, Healy, Persson, and Snowberg ; Nadeau, Lewis‐Beck, and Bélanger ), the dynamic aspect is lacking in most of the individual‐level work. That is, individual‐level evaluations of the government's performance are regressed on the dependent variable—indicating whether or not the voter voted for an incumbent party (Ecker, Glinitzer, and Meyer ). While such a model shows the impact of performance indicators on the party choice, it “does not measure a change in vote intention in response to a real change in the economy, as economic voting theory implies” (Dassonneville and Lewis‐Beck , 375, emphasis in the original), and this argument holds for the retrospective voting in general as well.…”

“…The independent variable of interest is the evaluation of the evolution of the state of the economy. Previous studies have used performance evaluations in different policy fields (Boyne et al ; Crisp et al ; Ecker, Glinitzer, and Meyer ; Hibbs ). However, the economy has received most scholarly attention (Bengtsson ; Fiorina , ; Lewis‐Beck and Stegmaier , , ; Powell and Whitten ; Williams, Stegmaier, and Debus ).…”